 Okay, then I'm going to call it on finance committee meeting of July 23 to order at five minutes after two, and thank everybody for being here, and there's a first order of business. I want to welcome three new members of the committee. I understand that if there's a process, and Mary Lou told me that if there's a process where they have to take both downstairs with a clerk and get certificates, they haven't actually processed that yet, but nonetheless the council voted last night, and so I appreciate you being here, and since non-voting members, but important members of the committee, I thought it was great to have you here, and I wanted you to sit up front and be able to participate as fully as you otherwise would anyway, so it doesn't really matter that we haven't gone through any final process yet. I'm going to start by going around with introductions and let the committee, all of us on the committee, introduce ourselves and then including the three new members, and then just do a couple of logistical things and get on with the agenda, and I'm Andy Steinberg, I am a counselor elected at large, and a member and chair of the finance committee in its current form, and so I'm going to now go all the way to my left and start with Shalini and just ask you to each identify yourself, that'll get us around to the new, our newest members. Hi everyone and welcome, so excited to have you all here with us, I'm Shalini, I'm a finance committee member as well as district counselor from District five. Hi Kathy Shane, welcome, I wasn't able to vote for you last night because I just got off White River rafting, so I'm also trying to reconnect with this other world, but I'm glad to be here, and I'm district one counselor. Hi, I'm Lynn Griezmer, I'm district two counselor, and it's my honor to be president of the town council, member of the finance committee, and I can't remember all the others. Hello, I'm Dorothy Pam, and I'm elected from district three, and I'm a member of the finance committee and the community resources committee, and welcome. Now you have to press the button as you speak, just so you know, yes, and hold it down. Hi, I'm Mary Lou Teilman, I'm the resident finance committee member. Hello, I'm Sharon Popinelli, and I'm also a resident finance committee member. Hi, I'm Bob Hegner, and I also am a resident member of the finance committee. So I'm going to ask everybody else as they come forward to speak at various points during the meeting to identify themselves, and hopefully we'll just slowly get to know each other. You've now got the logistics down of using the microphones, except for the position that I'm sitting in the center, to speak. One has to hold, press the button and hold it so that the green light is on as you speak. We are being recorded by Amherst Media, and thank you very much Amherst Media for being here, and in order to be heard both within the room and by people who will be watching on Amherst Media, it is essential that people do use their microphones as indicated. There are just a couple of other things that I wanted to indicate. One is that there's logistics, things that we're going to need to work out about getting you now the new members onto mailing lists and email lists and access to information, and we will attend to that and do course, but not try and deal with that in the midst of the meeting. And the other thing is actually I wanted to say to all members of the finance committee, one of the things that is going to, that is a reality is this by expanding from five to eight, there's more of us, and therefore each of us is, if we feel the need to speak, which is an important part of what the committee is, we have the danger of prolonging what have been two hour meetings, much longer meetings. So I really ask everybody, and this goes to the entire committee, to be conscious of time, because we all have other responsibilities in our lives, and so it's a cooperative effort that we all need to participate in. So with that, I think that the first agenda item is having to do with the borrowing authorization, and it's actually a matter that needs immediate attention from the committee to refer back to the council for people who are new to the process. One thing that's different in our new form of government in the way state law works is that there are these things called orders, which are financial orders that is what the council must pass to enact anything that is of a financial nature, and so what is going to be presented to us is a request to support an order authorizing borrowing for work on the Centennial Water Treatment Plant, and it would be funded, not from the full budget, it would be funded as will be, I assume, explained from the Water Enterprise Fund, and if you're not familiar with Enterprise Funds, then we will explain them probably outside of the meeting, but those are the kinds of questions that's reasonable to ask. So with that, Mr. Bauchman, are you going to do the introduction of this topic, or? Andi, I'll do minutes. You're switching Centennial Water to the overview of the building process. Guilford's going to switch the agenda a little and start with number three with the overview of the building process. Okay, I didn't know if you were going to do that first, or want to... No, I couldn't do this, I was assuming we were doing Centennial first, I don't know if there's anything to present on the screen to go with this. No, Centennial is quick and easy. Centennial is a water treatment plant we have in Pellum. It serves the Pellum Reservoir System, which consists of the Hills and Holley's reservoirs. There's a memo we gave to you earlier explaining a little bit more about the system. Back around 2005, we started looking at redoing and rehabbing this facility. It's our oldest water treatment plant we have in the water system. We have three of them. We have the Atkins. We have what we affectionately call baby carriage, and we have Centennial. So we need to upgrade it, bring it up to speed. It's actually had some casualties from lightning strikes over the last year, and it actually does not currently function. As we started the process back in about 2005 to redo this facility, we were just going to actually redo the facility. We were just going to use the same technology, put everything back the way it was, and just make it new and automate it a little bit. We had to do a sewer line to make it work properly, and we planned a sewer line. We also had to upgrade a pump station. The Centennial treatment plant is actually above the water grade line for the existing water system. So we had to take water from the Amherst system and pump it up into what we call the Pellum system, and that serves the Centennial plant. So as we were putting all this together, we started the project. We installed a sewer line. We did that in conjunction with a mass highway project to repave Pellum or Amherst Road, they call it in Pellum. We also installed the pump station. That's all done. As we were going through that process and going through a couple of years of doing that, it was about three years of process, we found out that we couldn't just replace the technology we had at the treatment plant. The technology was not meeting the requirements that DEP wanted us to meet. Basically, our issue we were having with the chlorination by products, they're called HAAs, Halacetic Acids and THMs, Tri-Methos, THMs. THMs and HAAs, they're bad things. They're caused by organic material, leaf matter, debris in the water, acting with chlorine and these by-products are created. They're considered possibly cancer causing and we have a certain level we have to keep below. Because this system is such a small system in the woods with lots of leaves and organic matter that falls into the reservoir, we were having a bit of a problem. We've gone to a different treatment system and that's what we're authorizing here. We're going to totally redesign the plant. $600 and some thousand dollars we're asking for to redesign it. We're going to hire Tate and Howard to do it. We're switching from the traditional filtration process to a DAF process, not DAPI duct, but dissolved air flotation system, call it DAF. It's much better at reducing all the organic material and not having as much disinfection by-products in your water system. That's what we're asking for, roughly $600,000 for the engineering and then $692. And then we'll be coming back to you in probably about a year to bond and authorize the bonding for the actual construction, which will be a little more. If there's any questions? Yes, Dorothy. So the $692,000 is for the study and then to build it, what kind of money is needed? $692,000 is for the design of the plant. The rough cost now for actually the entire project will be $11 million. And source of funds for this would be? The source of funds will be from the water enterprise system. This money is collected from the rate payers who buy water in the system. It's not from tax general taxation and it's not from the sewer funds or sewer rates. It's only from the people who purchase water in the system. Does that include the construction? It will also come from enterprise funds. That's right now that's the plan, yes. Do enterprise funds borrowing come under our cap? I guess I've been away too long. Not all of it. It depends on whether it's voted insider outside the debt limit. I believe a plant itself would be outside the debt limit, so I wouldn't count. Thank you. Yes. When we were reviewing the enterprise fund budget for FY20, was this already in that budget? It was. We did not put in the actual construction yet. We put in a placeholder for the construction. It was a little less than the total 11, but the borrowing for the engineering was put into the cap. And you had already figured it in to the, what it will do to the water rates when we were voting on the water rates? We did. Yeah, Lynn. Unless we have more questions, I'm ready to move. Yes, and I think that what the motion would be that we, that the finance committee would recommend to the town council. Okay, go ahead. That we appropriate and borrow order FY20-23 and order authorizing a borrowing for engineering service for the rehabilitation of the Centennial Water Treatment Plant treatment facility continued. And then it goes on to the council later, but it would be voted today by the finance committee for recommendation to the council and the council will bring it up at their meeting on August 19th. So the motion, is there a second to the motion? I second it. So the motion has been made by Lynn, seconded by Kathy, that the finance committee recommend to the council appropriation and barring order number 20-23 and order authorizing the borrowing for engineering services for rehabilitation of the Centennial Water treatment facility. No further discussion. Then all in favor indicate by raising hands. So it's any opposed? It's five to zero and Kathy's taking minutes for us today and hopefully very soon we will have a different system for minutes right now. We have been rotating amongst committee members, but we're working with the manager to have people who are actually hired to work to do minutes for committee meetings. We're taking turns until then and we'll call on everybody to help if need be. But thank you, Kathy, for doing it today. So then moving along to the second to the next agenda item, which is the building process presentation. So what I had asked while Guilford's getting set up, I've made this request for the education of the entire committee and to inform our next rounds of discussion that all have to do with capital items. A little bit more of an explanation about the entire process for building buildings and how things move from as you go through the process from feasibility study to schematic design, the OPM process, approval for funding, contracting of which there are two different kinds of options under Massachusetts law from municipalities to use the construction and the completion acceptance of buildings and how it works so that we have an understanding of the construction process because most of our summer is going to be one way or another dealing with issues of capital projects. While we're waiting for that, Andy, just again for the benefit of our new members in the audience, Amherst has not really had a very large construction process since 1990. And so we feel like as we move into the capital project phase of hopefully some new buildings for the town, that it's important for people to have a greater understanding of what that public process looks like. In the 1990 building was the police station facility. Thank you. So hopefully this goes better than that. Okay. So I think we did this once before with the entire select board, our entire council, right? Yes. Okay. So if I say anything and I bog down, just point to me to go faster and I'll go faster. All right. So these slides were taken from the, were given to us by the Massachusetts Inspector General's office and this is what they use when they actually teach this class. There's actually a program called the Massachusetts Revive Public Procurement Officers. In town, we have Holly Bowser and the accounting office. We have Sean from the schools, myself and Amy Rizeki, who's in my office. We're licensed, we're certified and Anthony Delaney is. So there's a group of us who go through this training. There's refresher training. We have to go through it a lot. The refresher training is great because we think we know something. We find out it's been changed by the legislature. We have to learn it a different way. So it's always, whatever I tell you is, it is changing and it's constantly being updated. So this is the slides I use in this class. I took some of the slides out that you don't really need to see, which are the boring ones and left you the really exciting ones. But don't get too excited because I'll start to worry if you do. So for the designer selection, we have this little table kind of lays out what you're allowed to do and what you're not allowed to do. Design services, if you have a design fee of over $30,000, your construction cost is over $300,000, you have to follow MGL Chapter 7. Construction services, if it's over $10,000 and it's a building, you've got to follow MGL 149. There are a couple other things that apply and we'll talk a little bit about this a little later. Public Works is all to the right. There's really no rule that tells me tells the public works person how to choose a designer. We're supposed to use best practices and choosing designers for public works projects or what we call horizontal projects. If it's construction services, once you get into building in public and chapter in a public works type stuff, we're supposed to be anything over 10,000, we have to use chapter 30b to buy it and procure it. There are some exceptions for mass support for UMass and all those people, they have their own little rules. These are the rules we have to really kind of apply for here for municipalities. The basic process is you plan, you design, you bid it, you build it. Design, bid, build. That's the process that it normally goes through. There is another process that we're going to talk about, which is a little different today, but that's your basic flow of how something goes. Do you want the questions now or later? It's up to you. Go ahead. Since the design costs seem to be so high in each of these projects, is there bidding for the designer? The bidding for the designer is controlled by the table I just told you here. So if it's a building project, you have to do a type of solicitation and I'll get to that later on for the designer. Public works, like I said, the designer, you're supposed to use best practices to choose that person. Owner, we have a lot of terms when we talk this process. The owner is us in these projects for the town. We're the owner. The people of the town, staff that's going to use it, you're the owner. Construction manager, a construction manager is someone who's going to manage the process. You can choose to have a construction manager in a big project or you can choose not to have a construction manager in a big project. Most of our public works projects, the construction manager falls as someone in the public works office to handle. In a building process, you can hire a construction manager to be your construction manager. That's also, affectionately, it used to be called the clerk of the works. It's kind of the same thing, a clerk of the works. That's the person who can do that. It's optional. It's not really required. We do have a requirement now to have an owner's project manager. Your project is going to be over $1.5 million or more. You're going to have to hire an owner's project manager. This was kind of a way to say it's nice to have a construction manager, but we're going to require a construction manager for some projects. This is it. The owner's project manager has to be qualified to do the work. They have to basically be someone who's skilled in that type of work. If you're building a building, it's usually someone who has experience in buildings. It's usually another architectural firm. You can have a person on staff do it. If you want to do that, you have a person who has some experience with it and they can be the owner's project manager and be responsible for it. The issue you have is making sure you have a person who can do the whole project or you can switch in the middle. Right now, where the public works building and the fire station building, I'm serving as the owner's project manager. As we move into the next phases, we're going to have to hire someone else to start taking over who has a little more experience in buildings besides my experience in buildings. That's something that's going to come up. There's going to have to be an owner's project manager hire at some point. It does the rules do allow you to start with an in-house person and then go to outside person if you want to. Rules also allow you to stay with an in-house person if you want to. The owner's project manager is really meant to be there to help the town and help the community doesn't normally do this. Most people don't do this very often. The owner's representative, if the product's going to be over $50 million, you have to have another person called an owner's project manager, project representative. The public works and fire is not over that. Schools may be hitting this owner's representative threshold. And then, of course, you need the designer. The designer is the person who is developing what you want into a scope of service, a budget, a schedule. They're going to make the detailed plans, specifications, and they're going to be with you through construction. They're going to be the people making sure what they designed is built. That's really their whole purpose in life. Sorry. And then you have the contractor. So the contractor is the person who built it. So the people who make up this whole project are the owner. The owner's project manager, if it's over $1.5 million, the designer and the contractor. Those are the key players you're going to bring to the table to put your building together and move forward. And this is kind of a little table that shows you how it all goes together. Owner, OPM is off to the right. Contractors, designers, and then designers and contractors can have subs. And OPM can have a sub too. When we were talking to do in the school projects last time, the OPM actually had a sub who was skilled in doing. They had a special sub that they had to help them with something they were doing. I think it was around the zero energy. No, it wasn't. This was with the school as a while back. Okay. It was something else. But you can have subs too. But this is the basic layout. All right. So let's see. This is the slide we kind of added in here. Another way of doing this instead of doing design, build, is we actually do design it with the builder with how are you hired? And then build it. So you kind of do design. You kind of have your designer and builder team together. And they work together to give you a design. And then they work together to build the building. So it's called my brain is just kind of dying today. It's called construction management at risk. And this is possible to do if it's over five million dollars. You do have to get approval from the state to do it. It's not something you're just allowed to do because it's relatively new. And a lot of people mess it up. What you're trying to do is you hire OPM, then you'll hire a designer, and then you'll hire your construction firm that's going to build your project. But you don't have the design. You use your designer and your builder all work together to give you what's supposed to be the best design and project you can have. So the thought is that there's a contractor and designer working together gives you that product. So that's the other way of doing this. We can talk a little bit more about it. You'll probably have a lot more questions about it. When you choose your designer, when you choose your OPM, and when you choose anybody who's in the design team, you have to do a qualifications based selection. You can set a dollar figure not to exceed, but you can't tell them. You can't make your choice based on price. You solicit qualifications from firms. If you want the perfect firm that's done like a million fire stations and you say they have to have done a million fire stations in their career, that's your qualification statement. So you put together what you want your qualities your desire to be and you choose your designer based on those qualifications. It's not based on money. So in this building process, I'm getting a lot of weird looks. I'm trying to say it again. Does anybody have a question to help me get off my... Hi. Where in the process is there any independent cost estimate that the town does or someone else does to kind of put a grounding in reality on cost? Okay. So that's done during several places during the design process. You can choose multiple places to actually do that if you want to. But it's usually in the design process that you'll have independent estimate verification. But everybody understand what a qualification based selection is? You choose somebody based on their qualifications. It's not based on the price they give you. You don't go to your friend who says I'll design this for 20 bucks for you when it's really going to cost 400,000 bucks and your friend really doesn't know what he's designing. You want a school house and you want to get a dog house. That's what the qualification based statement is for. You have to do that for both the OPM and the designer. This is state law. Yes. Okay. Because you can make your qualifications. You can custom make them to fit just only one or two people. I don't see how it avoids graft or anything. If you do that you're gonna probably get another number of people complaining about your solicitation to the IG's office. You'll have to go do it again. So as you write this you have to be understanding the fact that people are watching you. There's people who want to do your business with you and if you restrict them from doing business with you and they think it's unfair they will complain to the IG and the IG and Inspector General will make you change it and do it again regardless of what you've done. Okay go ahead and then I will get into the questions that I have after you because you may cover them. Okay. So that's basically the overview of how. So that's basically the overview of how the process goes and how you would make your selection of your designers. Like I said there's bunch of slides I hid but you really don't want to see those. They're great question slides for the test that we have to take when we do this thing. So then designer contracts. So once you decide you're going to do the designer you have to do the qualification based. All your designers must be licensed and certified to work and seal their designs. In this state you can't hire someone from California who is more experienced than something just because they're more experienced they have to have someone in the state of Massachusetts who can sign and stamp their drawings. These are the stages of the design process. You have a planning stage which usually can go on with or without the design with your designer. Sometimes you have a pre pre pre planning stage and then you go into a planning stage once you've hired an ear designer and then you do go into the design phase which is schematic documents and you kind of lay out what you're going to do. You do develop your documents fully and then you have your construction documents. That's the point where you're ready to say yes I'm going to do this. You develop your bidding documents and you start doing bidding and you start doing your construction. So this is kind of the layout of how the process goes. Planning, design, construction. And then design is kind of broken out in those steps. Where does the feasibility study fit into that? Is that the planning study? Yes. If you do a full, if you do a, if you do a feasibility study, if you do something that's formal, a formal feasibility study that's the world is looking for, you would do it in the planning process because that'll give you the information you need to go on to your design. So I'm going to continue on that for a second and we can use either DPW or FHIR as examples because they're the ones that are probably a long farthest in this right now. With those we have head feasibility studies that were done and they put numbers on that. How realistic to the end result are those numbers and how did they, you know, what was the process to get there? How deep a dive into needs and costs were made to get there? The number you mean how much the cost is or how much square footage? Cost. Okay. So in our feasibility study for the DPW and the FHIR those numbers are based on industry standards for square foot cost and there's also a contingency added in there because when the feasibility study is done there's no site chosen. So you have to make some assumptions. You assume that you get the best site you have possible and if you do that then if you have the rockiest site available then you would cost will go up. If you have a site that has poor soils your price could still go up. If you actually find the perfect sweet spot site your price may be very close to what they quote you. But in your feasibility study it's based on industry standards for cost and rules of thumbs and there's a contingency built in for the unknowns. Yeah, Lynn and then Kathy in that order. So really two questions that go with this. If you look at this process and you look at the two different approaches that you're allowed to do the more regular one and the newer one at which point do the individuals get involved in say the original process and the newer process. Okay so if you're doing a your basic design bid build process you're going to hire before you do your formal feasibility study you're going to hire your OPM and you're going to hire your designer. Once you finish your formal feasibility study and you finish your schematic designs your schematic drawings at that point you're going to start looking for your if you're going to do a CM at risk you're going to build a contractor you want to hire him before you go beyond any farther beyond where you are. Meaning before you go to design. Before you go into the final phases of design you're going to have your for the construction. You're going to have your construction manager construction at risk person on board your contractor on board. If you're going to wait and do the formal or the old traditional design bid build you'll wait till construction bidding to bring on your your builder. Okay and my next question then is I assume that it is at what point and maybe Sonia would be part of answering this at which point in this process does the decision come back to the council as to whether to go ahead with the construction and fund it and or go out for a debt exclusion override. I'll take a first crack so the way we've been funding this process right now is we've been funding each step as we go along. So every time we get ready for the next step that's the step where the council gets to say projects up or projects down and then how you choose to fund it whether it's a debt exclusion or whether it's on that of the general. So right now we've already funded the feasibility studies for DPW and FIRE. Our next decision as a council will be whether or not we're going to fund the schematic design studies for FIRE and DPW. Your next one is schematic design was kind of done in the feasibility studies as well. We have our schematics it'll be the design development documents and the construction documents as our next phase for FIRE and DPW. And in those both of those instances we still need to bring in the net zero. You need to start thinking about that then yes. Yeah I hope so. All right and then the third phase obviously for that for any kind of debt is when you actually move to construction. You can I mean it's up to you the council and this what your financial advisors tell you about whether or not how you can pay for the construction design if they tell you that there's if you are going to do three design processes they're going to say they're going to bond all three of them that would be a debt exclusion or a debt process there not necessarily debt exclusion but a debt borrowing versus taking it from what's available in the money pool and no one's throwing anything at me there so I think I got that right. So there can be many parts to borrowing you can you can borrow for each part of this individually each project individually or you can pull it all together depending on the timing of when cash flow is needed. So that's what it that's what that depends on and we do a lot of bond anticipation notes to provide for construction up until the project is done and then we do a complete borrowing as to whether it's a debt exclusion override or not I that's a council that's a town town decision political decision which is going to be a debt exclusion on which ones are that's not really the treasurer or the finance tractors. Good, Kathy. If to what extent when you're in the going for the full design can you be interactive so you could if I think of building a house I say I've got I don't want to spend any more than 30 million 25 million or 10 million whatever my number is but but you something comes back to you and say what do I give up or can I do it in phases while still meeting the standards for let's do fire department or DPW but we can do some part of it less expensively but there's some core pieces we have to do this way is there that kind of interactive discussion. That type of interactive construction discussion can go on throughout the whole process actually if you think about it and it depends on the types and the levels of discussions you're having deciding on whether to build a a Cadillac version of a DPW versus a non Cadillac version that can happen pretty pretty soon if you want to have gold plated floor coverings that's that's pretty you know that's something you can decide pretty early in the process throughout the whole process you're going to get to a certain point and look at the price and say is this price acceptable and this is what I'm getting for this price so we have a price right now for fire and DPW so the question is based on where we are in the process is that acceptable or not and if someone says no that's way out of ballpark we're not going to do any more you can say that and that's you know why we've broken it up into in the phases of how we design it so you could say we're not going to pay that much money but we'll what can we get for this much money and you can adjust a little bit and and since we're already at the end of one phase what you would do is maybe say that and then when you go out for your next designer you would say this is what you're looking to do or when you go to the next phase which is the design process you tell the designers this is what we want to do and this is the ball park we want to stay in and when you say you is that a committee is that a group of people you know I'm just thinking of you know we've got as you know we've got a whole bunch of buildings lined up here and if we say here's here's what the total but the total could be less if each of these came in less expensive Lee so that interaction with the people who live in a DPW building might want a different I mean I don't even think of Cadillac as my standard anymore I would like a good sturdy Prius version but but yeah but one that is completely functional but doesn't have frills but that we won't say 20 years from now boy did we make a mistake because we cut a corner here yes you threw me off to cut the corner no I was just saying when the U is like like you alone like a committee you when I say you I mean the owner so however the owner defines yourselves if the council says the owner shall be a committee that shall manage this for the town for the owner that committee the town manager still has a say in how things go because most of these committees that do these things report back to the town manager so the town manager is responsible for coordinating all that stuff so he would actually if you want to coordinate more of the three buildings all at once that would go there although I don't think the buildings are in a position to be coordinated all together only the police and our DPW keep saying police DPW and public works would be able to be coordinated together I know it's weird so actually so planning stage this is what we were kind of already talked about this a lot more the more the planning stage study this is what's already been done for police and fire I mean DPW and fire I did it again and then our deliverables yes we have schematic drawings of what each space size should be and we have a preliminary specification for each space and we have a cost figure for each space that's this is what we've already done and now we need to go into this phase for the DPW and fire plans and specifications if you decide you want to do CM at risk for DPW station or for the fire station you would bring on your CM at risk at this point in the game before you start your plans and your specifications because your CM at risk is a member at the design table is your deliverables from your design process as you go forward and if you use CM at risk what you also have is your maximum price your CM is your building is going to cost you because you've already brought your builder on and he's going to be willing to do it he's already told you what the price is and you're going to know what the price of the building is before you bid it because you've already kind of done that the CM at risk allows you to develop that number while you're doing the design in a sense the CMs at risk are paid a flat rate for their services plus an actual cost of the items so if they put in 40 square feet of floor and the 40 square feet of floor the rate of flooring is $20 a floor they're paid for that plus there's a fat flat rate that goes with that that's negotiated when you bring them on board so you kind of know one of the benefits to the benefits of a CM at risk is you know your price as you're as you're building your project the other thing you know is who's doing it and they have an idea exactly what they're doing there's no risk that someone will misinterpret the design plans or specifications during the bidding process one of the drawbacks of a CM at risk at this stage is if you're truly going to do the DPW project and you're going to say well we're going to build only phases of the project and you haven't told your CM at risk you're doing that when you bring them on board you've kind of messed up his pricing scheme and you've kind of put him in a disadvantage and he may not want it to be part of your process and he may not like that if there's got some big changes you're going to make in the design as the design goes on you may not want to use CM at risk for that if you know pretty much where you're going with the picture CM at risk will be able to help you see a better picture as you go along did that make sense yes me Dorothy does the CM at risk result in good design I mean I the first part design bid build made sure that the designer was not connected with any of the other people that it was independent as if that's a good thing the CM at risk is not independent and I just remember recently Amherst media was told go back and get an architect you don't use the contract contractor to do the design so I'm just wondering is this a good thing so CM at risk as I said has plus and a minus is when you actually hire your CM at risk and when you advertise for one they cannot be affiliated with your designer whoever you choose as your designer if they have a CM a CM at risk part of their business that part of the business cannot bid on the project they have to be totally separate and independent so in the process you're still having two separate independent people working for you there's no ability for occlusion that way and if there is occlusion someone will find it and they'll tell the IG and the IG will come talk to you and all that good stuff will happen again okay so so during the construction the stage this is what your designer these are your tasks your designer has to do your OPM is also doing these things as well keeping track of what's going on making sure that there's accountability from all three both the parties so you actually have three checks going on during the process the contractor is giving you something the OPM is giving you something the designer is giving you something and then this is just more about the designer selection law which we've already gone over several times so the price that we can see of for building for example once we're working on right now we've talked about is TPW and FIRE is being farthest along we have a number from feasibility of what we've you described how it was calculated it was rough figure based upon square footage without knowledge of the site or factoring in those details then you get into the schematic when you know that there's a site available and that gets to something that you take out the bid assuming especially that we're going on the design bid build process you don't know that contractors will actually bid for the amount of money you envision until they bid I assume and so it seems like the number can still move throughout the process at least until that point possibly later if there are things that are discovered in the construction so how much variation amongst all of those numbers is common so depending on how well your project goes is you know if you get a 10% if you bring your project in under 10% you're usually like you're gold and you've done a good job so if your estimate was this number and not only go over 10% that's a really good job in the market we're in right now you have a bit of volatility going on we have some issues with fuel prices we have some issues with steel prices and those are things you really can't factor in on things that may change as the whole project goes along you may in I mean the quickest best way to do this is be as fast as you can design it get it built keep it in a short window the price you have for the DPW building already is three years old so you take those numbers they have to be inflated a little bit because prices have already changed we have steel tariffs in place we're having we have price increases on things that aren't made of steel because in order to get them there's some steel thing in them or steel process going on and the price is a little more expensive there's more things that's having tariffs put on them those drive up the cost my standard answer for anything is it takes you four to eight weeks to get it that's going on too so the more you can control your project as far as how fast you want to go what you know what you want to do and get things going you'll have a lower price the fire station was finished in 17 so it's only that number's only two years old so those things factor in and it's hard to tell because the market can change or things can change UMass could have another building boom if UMass has another building boom then we're going to be short builders and then you're going to have you're going to be asking for builders to do something when they really don't want to do it because they have plenty of work to do so they're going to charge you a higher price if you have a building decline at UMass there'll be plenty of builders with nothing to do and you'll get really good low prices because people want to work that's kind of the nature of the construction industry and how it goes okay great Lou I've excuse me I've listened to the architects for the wild wildwood and Fort River and both of those I guess they're designers now have come in with several different models that you could look at is that what would happen with these projects that once we hire the designer you could say show us a building at 50 million 60 million 70 million so that you're not designing for the very best and then trying to scale back if we decide that these projects all of them together are quite expensive you could take that approach if you wanted to the approach that you should probably take with a fire and DPW is what what features do you build on and we need an administrative office we need this much we want this much heated space versus this much heated space put together a package not of not based on a value but based on building certain components of your of your project and seeing how it comes that way that probably a better way but you could say we only want to spend 30,000 or 30 million dollars telling what it is we only want to spend 15 million dollars telling what it is you could do that that's up to the process and how you choose so looking at the two projects that are further so long you really can't split up fire and EMS I mean they are the same people they have to live in the same buildings and there's only going to be one of those buildings so you can't say gee what would happen if we didn't have the EMS equipment in that building on the other hand with the DPW there's actually various departments spread around the town some of which can be moved and some of which can't be moved for instance right now parks and recs are often one area and a building that would be built with parks and recs would be bigger than if we say parks and recs isn't going to move into that building another option to look at is are we going to have a community room in each of these buildings or aren't we going to have a community room community rooms double is training rooms so there's those various things that can help us trim costs but some of them we can't compromise on because fire and EMS are the same people just a clarifying question to follow up on what Mary Lou was asking so we could give specifications of course but could we ask for different configurations different configurations as in how buildings our buildings are set up yeah like I mean yeah and and different price ranges well once you kind of the way to go would be different configurations of the building and then you then you can price our engineering value look at the value of different types of materials look at the values of different types of spaces I you know the ideal the ideal DPW I saw this in a recently we were out in a another country looking at their DPW and it was gorgeous and it was like it was a Cadillac every space was heated to a nice ambient temperature nice and warm inside you can walk around in a t-shirt and shorts the whole whole place but that's not that's not what we need you know I the DPW has certain vehicles that have to be kept above freezing they have certain vehicles that just need to be under cover and kept out of the snow and the wind and the elements so that's kind of how you want to look at it and but you could say we'd like to see what a one-story versus a two-story would look like yes if you but then what's one two yeah you can see but what would be in those one or two stories yes so let me just for everybody to remind you the flow of this meeting what we're trying what we're trying to accomplish today and the order in which we're going to do it is then if there are additional questions for Guilford I want to then get that out of them so that he can get on his way to other things um the council had referred to this committee and the community resources committee the responsibility to look at a request from the public arts commission for percent for arts proposal and that is of course going to be if it is as they propose it a part of building projects so I wanted to have that is the next item on the agenda because we do have a responsibility to do a preliminary report back to the council and so I wanted to get some discussion of that going so public arts commission is present then the next thing I think that I would like to take up because it gets back into an issue that Lynn had raised earlier which is when do you make the decision as to how to finance a project and whether it be debt exclusion or be funded just by general authorization of bonds from other sources and so Sean has been working with us for some time on an analytical tool to help us look at that issue so I would propose that we then go to that presentation because I think it just it's sort of as part of this flow because today is really to get us moving on a big responsibility we have which gets to then the last item that I want to at least get some discussion on but we may have to limit it depending upon time but we have to start thinking about what is the decision making process that we're proposing for the entire community to make decisions on these projects and today was really about providing information that is feeding into that process but we then have to start talking about the process itself so just so everybody understands the agenda and the intent of the agenda are there other questions for Gilford now we see where it's going of things knowing where it's going that you just want to ask now because otherwise we want to thank him for being here let him get on the other things Bob yeah I just have a general question in terms of the process for the change control management process in other words in any construction project you always have a change and a change order and how is that going to be managed and at what point does that go either to the committee or to the council so we haven't actually talked about how we would do that I can tell you how we do it now for our regular projects we do and then I assume it would be basically the same the same process so in a public worksite process and we have a change order we look and see make sure if it's in the scope of the work and if it's inside the scope of the money we have available because we always have a little contingency built into the project if we're in that we're okay we usually authorize if it's all right if we're outside the scope of the project or outside the scope of the money it's authorized we go to the town manager and we discuss what to do and whether it's going to be approved or not if it's approved and we have no money to be used for it then we have to come to the council for an authorization of money so as we talk about these bigger projects and we decide whether they're going to be a building committee or so forth those things would probably worked out in the steps and how the committees will work because with a committee you'd also probably you'd bring the committee in and I've seen this in other places you'd bring the committee in as well and say this is what the change is this is what it is and they even have to make a recommendation as well so it's something it's a good question and it's something we'll have to be worked out and right now that's how we do it and I assume it would just be expanded as we go forward with the bigger projects and I as we move into the net zero you know it's like these windows could cost this or they could cost that but then what will they return and energy saving so and that's a black box for us but not for all communities but not a lot of communities so it's going to be a real challenge and there's one additional piece in that Sean may speak on this a little bit later if he has time and inclination and that is that we also have partners in the building process for some of our buildings that we're talking about library and schools and going straight to the schools mass school building authority has a definite role to play in changes that we make and how they're very much part of the process because they're a partner in the process in many ways including paying for it so that's another factor that we all have to recognize anything else for this phase for Guilford Guilford, thank you very much this has been extremely helpful and I appreciate your time this afternoon and providing this for us it was really great thank you you're welcome so I think what we want to do is keep moving and the S or or bill from our public arts commission to come forward introduce himself and he's going to make a presentation about how public arts fits into building projects as the envision to buy the public arts commission do I have that correctly? close okay then go with it thank you Andy and thank you to the finance committee for having me here my name is William Cazan I live 32 Golden Rod Circle here in Amherst and I am the new chair of the public art committee and I'm here to present to you on the percent for art by law and more generally on public art and its value to a town like Amherst okay so this should last around five minutes it might go a little bit longer I'll do my best if I'm speaking too quickly I apologize thank you for having me so what is public arts? public art is art that is available to the public for free and when we talk about the percent for art by law that town meeting passed over two years ago now but that still hasn't taken effect for a variety of reasons which we may or may not discuss today we're talking about publicly funded public art meaning that typically some portion of a town or city's taxes go to pay for public art projects in that town so the percent for art by law that was proposed by Eric Brody and the Amherst public art commission and Eric will join me at the table shortly and that was passed by town meeting in the spring of 2017 I believe was that a half a percent not a full percent just half a percent which is within the range these programs range from two percent to about half a percent of the budget of all public capital construction projects over a hundred thousand dollars in town will be used for on-site art as well as for the performing arts the performing arts portion of this turned out to be more difficult although I think it's something valuable and worth fighting for so the question is can Amherst afford the percent for art by law well town meeting thought so I don't know if the council will think so or if the finance committee will think so but I think so so I'm going to cite some statistics for you the massachusetts cultural council this year in 2019 reported that three out of four residents participate in at least one cultural event each month here in massachusetts in 2019 the arts here generated 97 million in direct revenue 880 million in indirect spending and 2.3 billion which is kind of a wow number maybe too much of a wow number total impact on the state as a whole as they determine certainly that 880 million in indirect spending I think is something that we as a town can try to capture in one way or another and percent for art can be part of that so the national governor's association has come out pretty strongly in support of percent for art programs at the state and local level and this is what they say in a recent report that they wrote the question of how to foster high quality places is one of the most important in economic development today by providing amenities connectivity and a sense of place public art and well-designed public spaces can be part of the answer they contribute to the visual landscape and character of a stator city they help transform transportation corridors and waterfronts into welcoming places for people to live work and play and to gather as a community the national assembly of state arts agencies has a very specific detailed publication on percent for art programs and they talk about the ways in which these programs serve economic development both as they're being executed by creating jobs for artists, designers and the people who construct these projects and these projects also generate of course the create ideally iconic works of art that draw people to your town become they contribute to places as a tourist destinations and Amherst talks a lot about becoming a two season economy bringing people here in the summer as well as during the year when the students are here and the arts of course could potentially contribute greatly to that and all this is tied to what's called the creative place making movement I don't have time to get too deeply into that but I'm happy to talk about it more later but the other thing to keep in mind that the national assembly of state arts agencies says is that these kinds of programs serve social justice because they bring the arts to underserved communities to people who don't necessarily have access to the arts and so there's also that component to these kinds of programs as well and just to add because I keep getting pushback is that these programs are not just for big cities Americans for the arts reports that of 350 public art programs in the U.S. there are 111 that serve populations of 150,000 or less and so you know Amherst is a bit smaller than 150,000 but one of the programs that gets singled out in some of this literature is in rural Vermont and so we're bigger than a lot of these programs as well places that have these programs so it's certainly feasible so the former finance director when Eric was developing this bylaw said that if we were to enact it half a percent of art would cost the average Amherst taxpayer less than a cup of coffee per year now Andy threw some new numbers at me which I think are probably true so let's say the elementary school project sadly is now up to 80 million dollars in the town the town's part of that is 40 million so we take a 25 year a 25 year bond at four and a half percent interest well that only comes out to using Sandy's numbers adjusted with Andy's numbers a dollar 89 per year for the average taxpayer if we go out for a dead override now by my own calculations if we don't and we take a portion of this from let's say property tax revenue it's actually less than a percent that it would cost the average taxpayer per year so we can look more specifically at numbers and I look forward to the work book that Sean is going to distribute hopefully soon so that I can play with that and plug in some numbers and really take a good strong look at how this would affect the town and our town finances so I want to conclude just by trying to get people excited and fired up by what public art and percent for art programs have done and fire and DPW keep coming up over and over again why would we want to have art in a fire station or at the DPW well it turns out that there are lots and lots of places that do have art at their fire stations at their DPWs and have executed wonderful things so I'm going to look mostly at Cambridge in New York City only because they have the best documented programs so it was easy they were easiest for me to grab images from and talk about them but this is an iconic enormous mural which you could see on the splash screen of my presentation in Inman Square in Cambridge painted in 1976 for the Bicentennial year which shows I think if you look closely George Washington and Ben Franklin together with the fire squad there the Inman Square fire station that's really like an iconic work of art in Cambridge that the work of public art in Cambridge here's another project much more recent by Julian Laverdiere he did the at ground zero the tribute in light after the towers fell and here he worked with the architects who developed a new fire station in Brooklyn engine company 277 to come up with what he called his sentinel lantern so he worked to develop the entire facade of the station including these two massive sort of post minimalist light fixtures encased in which on the left is the high pressure hose on the right the fire acts but that sort of beam out light to the street and announced to the public what it is these fire companies do an artist who I knew quite well when he was alive his work was on the cover of a book I wrote Vito Acconci actually is one of two artists who have now developed these amazing projects at the Newton Creek water treatment plant in Green Point, Brooklyn I don't know how familiar any of you are in New York these enormous egg shaped water treatment domes on the waterfront there so he designed this project called waterfall in and out which weaves outside and inside the visitor center of the water treatment facility demonstrating in a way the ways in which these sort of buildings capture, treat and then redistribute this important public resource another image of that project as it moves into the building and one more and George Trachas who actually has a work on the UMass campus has also designed a project for the same site this is actually along the water at the foot of the treatment plant an entire park with walkways sculptural elements that actually bring people down to the water out from the plant and into the environment another very famous artist who's worked with environmental concerns and feminist concerns is the feminist conceptual artist Merle Laderman-Euclides who actually designed Danahy Park in Cambridge as part of their percent for art program so that's an old landfill that now has become it was 15 years ago a park where she designed a number of elements she was the artist in residence at Fresh Kills in New York which went from the world's biggest landfill now into this amazing park for Staten Island residents and for people all around the world one of her many projects is building two enormous earthworks which you see in the map on the bottom right in green and then a viewing platform out over what had once been a landfill and is now becoming a beautiful park another project that she did that's become quite inspirational is to take these garbage trucks and coat them in mirrors this piece is called the social mirror and it was from the 80s long before people were worried about environmental problems to reflect both the natural environment and the people as these trucks passed by this project has been revived in New York and in Washington DC was inspired by it and they've started their own project painting trash trucks now of course we don't have public trash but you could certainly imagine projects like this school buses DPW trucks whatever all could be funded potentially by percent for art potentially or some kind of public art program in Amherst and then quickly just a fun project that I like from Cambridge this hopscott sculpture by an artist local artist named Tori Fair it looks like this weird spilled blob from a distance but creates this fun play space but using a kind of minimalist sculptural idiom for kids in the neighborhood or anybody who ventures into Cambridge to see it walks past the park or travels there specifically to see it and last but not least another project this one from the Bronx in New York Riverbank State Park Milo Matola who worked for Sesame Street actually built this carousel on this park by commissioning local kids to do drawings and then turning them into the actual creatures that they ride on in the carousel itself so imagine something like this add a new DBW why not right we need places for kids to play or at a school at the elementary school so I just this is my I'm done and I think the whole question here is want to value obviously I would say we all value the arts everybody who ran for the council when they were asked in a questionnaire before the election said we value the arts but the question really is do we as a town value the arts enough to actually pay for them thank you thank you which is obviously still where you are for a minute because I'm going to turn to questions just to remind everybody what happened with the percent for arts that was passed by town meeting it was then so this can be done quickly it was referred to the legislature because it was a piece that needed legislative authorization there are two things that had to happen in order for it to become an enacted bylaw under the rules that applied to towns as opposed to cities the attorney general has to approve a proposed bylaw before the bylaw can become effective and the attorney general held off on considering approval of the bylaw until the legislative activity was complete because the legislature's authorization for a piece of it was an essential element the legislature consulted the department of revenue the department of revenue raised a series of questions about the proposal and in that whole thing it got gummed up between the DOR attorney and the senate for completing action in the legislature and as a result it did not get past the legislature in the session which was being considered and then the attorney general did not act on it because they didn't feel that they had anything to act on so that the bylaw as proposed was not enacted the public art commission came about a month and a half ago approximately to the council and so asked the council to consider the issue yet again and so it was referred to the two committees that I mentioned including this one which is what the purpose of today's presentation is about it's the first real discussion at this committee the it really has several different elements one is the question of any financial issues that the committee may wish to raise we also have to structure the bylaw and the bylaw one of the things that I was concerned about the more I got to know about construction projects in how construction projects works as whether the bylaw as it was originally drafted actually fit within the construction project scheduling as well as I thought that it did it at the time and but that revisiting would be a stage if we go forward and it's really the council that's going to manage that process but for the financial aspects of it it is before this committee it has been referred by the council to this committee so I want to turn it back to you now to follow up well I confess I'm Eric Brody the former chair of the public art commission 318 strong street I confess that I'm being a little puzzled by why we are actually before the finance committee today what our objective is because we did present before the CRC the community resource committee at it was at it was then decided that a revision of the bylaw would be referred to a working group to make a version of the bylaw that did not have to go through the state legislature for approval book could be approved by the town that it didn't have the special act attached to it and my understanding of the process was that that revision would take place it would be then vetted by the CRC as to whether they liked what they saw in terms of the terms of the by revised bylaw and then it would come before the finance committee to determine whether the town could afford it on whatever the expense might be once it was revised so none of that has happened yet and so I'm not entirely sure what you want to hear from us today we are you're just urging that this process move forward and when I heard Guilford mooring's presentation I became even more concerned because having learned that the schematics have already been done and feasibility studies for the fire and dbw projects have already occurred my concern is that with public art commissions the percent for art is already late for those two projects the idea of an effective efficient a percent for our project is one that where the artist is involved from the get-go as soon as the design is they begin to talk about design an artist should be involved so that there's some concept being talked about from the beginning so that the art just doesn't get considered as an add-on something that's tacked on after everything else has already been decided about design so we haven't been through this before to determine exactly when certain things take place but it seems to me that we're already a little bit late to the party on two of the four major building projects that we're looking to do here at Amherst I'm happy to answer questions I'm sure Bill is too but I'm not exactly sure you want to hear from us now I'm going to ask the council president since she's part of this committee also to address some of what she just she can answer some of your questions let me try to answer the two questions I've heard the first one is why both committees community resources and finance and the reason is that when the council voted to refer this they've voted to refer to both one committee does not have authority over the other both of them are committees of the council and need to report back to the council on those items that are respectively assigned to their their committees so the community resource committee looks at it from a standpoint of its value if you will and I don't mean monetarily but it's value to the community how it fits in with the overall vision of the community the finance committee looks at it from the standpoint of finance I understand that entirely Lynn my only concern was the process which comes first it seemed to me that the finance committee would not quite know how to deal with a bylaw that it was they didn't have before them in terms of are we talking about half a percent now are we talking our caps having been added that we have no revised bylaw for the finance committee to consider at this point and being aware of this and being asked by the community resource committee how they wanted to proceed I suggested that we go ahead with our meeting today and that with some that somebody be on this working group also represents the finance hat now that's pretty easy because there's a couple people on the finance committee who are also on the community resources committee so but I I do not see any sense in looking at the revision of a bylaw unless we're looking at from both perspective of the communities and its value and its finance so that's it's really to urge that rather than go back and forth between committees that if we're going to have a working group it'd be a working group that represents those various perspectives and let me just so you don't completely frustrated there are going to be a couple other levels of review before any action can take place anything that would relate to itself as a bylaw would also have to go to the governance organization and legislative committee and for forum substance and actionability and in this case would also have to go to the town attorney which is a group that we retained for the review of these kinds of items so there that's one piece of it okay and and it's merely to say if we're going to look at a rewrite of this then let's make sure that's whoever's on this committee has the representation that is brought by CRC and also the finance committee I understand that entirely and I have no problem with any of that and I would like to know how you see the process proceeding from here so let me address the second question and no you're not too late to the party those those feasibility studies that were done are one is three years old one is two years old and they could not go anywhere with they were just dead in the water until we had actual sites and we are only in the we are only in the process right now of exploring a site for DBW based on the Amherst College very generous offer to explore the site off of southeast street and if we move as we move forward once we have those sites you really as Guilford's pointed out feasibility studies are only 10 to 30 percent of what you need to be able to talk about what is a building really and so while percent for art wasn't in those neither was net zero and so but yet you look at for instance the Fort River study that was recently done or the work that's been done in the library and both of those studies have actually brought in energy saving viewpoints and expertise into the design so there's a lot more to be done on any of this that the train has not left any station left yet and the voters still have a lot to say about it I'm glad you hear that that's that is really where we stand on that but going back to your first point I think we should proceed with any questions from a financial standpoint today and then I think we should proceed with a working group that's going to look at the energy but at the at the percent for art who has the authority to call the working group and when might that happen I would expect that CRC and finance would come forward to the council we would form the working group so we will be a vote of the whole council to start the working group on this generally that's how we would go forward we haven't formed any well that's not true we have we formed a number of we formed a committee but we've not formed working groups since it would not be a working group of one single committee would have to be a working group of the council part of the problem of course is that work groups were put into rules of procedure with that blank place and we're not there yet because it was referred back to I believe to YOL to come back to us for a proposal on flushing out what's really a blank section of the council rules of procedure so we're in the process but I think that the council always has the authority to create a work group without it being in the rules of procedure by the way otherwise known as ad hoc committees yes which we always have the authority Kathy yeah I was just going to say that you know actually it's it's a sentence in the rules rather than a and it was a paragraph but it can be formed and the idea is that it wouldn't be just council members you know that it would be a real working group to work out things so it could be cross committee and Lynn I do think we we're meeting the GOL group has asked me to come to explain why particularly I love the idea of work groups as to shallony on the rules committee to when we were writing this because I think they're a flexible vehicle to just hash out whatever the questions are and come back with proposals so I think we do need to get one in in motion rather than just in concept that that was in fact a discussion last night when we just had the first reading of the changes to the rules of procedure that the first time that would come back to the council is August 19th for that matter the first time anything's going to come back to the council is August 19th since we don't meet again until then but the reality is that we can form an ad hoc committee anytime that's already provided for so when might that happen we can try to put it on the August 15th 19th agenda but I will tell you it's already a very unusual meeting if you ever want to see a strange council meeting come to the one where we walk in the door we receive copies of all of what we've written for the town manager's evaluation and we sit here in front of the TV and they watch us read for and at 630 we will take up business for one hour and then go back to reading and discussing so yeah I don't think I think that today I'm gonna get back to today was important because it was referred to our committee as well as CRC this committee has not has got had a referral of a proposal but has not had a presentation about our discussion about the proposal and I appreciate Eric that you were at our last meeting and couldn't do it I wanted to get that introduction for this committee done I felt that that was important that we get it started so that people could begin to understand what this was about and ask initial questions and I thank you very much for doing that because I think it is helpful to get this committee involved otherwise it was sort of a referral with a blank and you helped fill in the blank so I appreciate it and I'm going to turn to the committee now for a few minutes for questions and then I want to we're going to have to then get a couple minutes public comment and I want to have time for Sean is he is an important presentation also to make for us Dorothea you seen Dorie you used I understand your frustration but we have been so busy we haven't had a chance to really do much now Andy wrote a long list of questions and things that he thought we should consider we haven't really had the space in which to talk about them and I put together some ideas today and they're kind of half CRC and half finance committee because question one is why should the taxpayers of Amherst pay for art and I have a few thoughts I'll give you a copy afterwards but and some of these are things that you would agree with and some of them are things that you might not agree with which we have to discuss in great detail because Andy has said and I did check the minutes that he thought we needed to rewrite the bylaw so that has not happened in the working group would probably do that but I'm just going to read to you public art reflects our values New England culture and history spiritual intellectual physical life nature transcendentalism originality and creativity there are a few works of public art in Amherst few statues of significant people or commemorating events there is a steel sculpture of Emily Dickinson Robert Frost there are some statues on the Amherst College campus there's the Amherst College War Memorial there's some Tiffany windows there is no child friendly art except for a little bronze pony in the Wildwood cemetery which is delightful so that when I take people around Amherst we go to only a few places to look at things that reflect Amherst we don't even exhibit our civil war stones which I find upsetting so a walker in Amherst does not see our history and culture and I think that's very important that they do that but I have some limitations that I'm suggesting I think that this is also a way we're going to spend tons of money on designers builders contractors and I think we should also provide work for artists but I want them to be local western mass artists I put down I thought well how much money is there so much money is going to go on the administration this is the maintenance the supervision I'm thinking what's left over for the artist and I thought well maybe half a year's salary or a year something that would reflect that maybe it's only as small as thirty or seventy thousand dollars but it's for the time in the effort because this is the people of Amherst are paying for this art it not rich donors so it's therefore I also think it's important that it express the values of the workers at the sites as well as of the artists the people at the sites must accept and be happy with the art and I think I looked at your bylaw again some works of art might not have to be exactly that are connected with the public building might not have to be exactly at the site for example brief discussion with Lynn today DPW perhaps the art could be in the area around DPW for the benefit of the community which is nearby also this is part of education and delight for the public so I hope that the artist this is not in your thing would be available for some talks in schools and would be involved in or maybe your committee would be doing the booklet of artwork in the town but I just wanted to say I support the idea we have a lot of questions as to how the financing fits with this challenge we have which is leading into the device of how are we going to afford these buildings but I think Lynn is right there's still time to do it and I think Amherst needs this thank you yes Kathy I agree with what Dorothy just said and knowing this was coming up started doing clippings and one was a Norwegian city that no one ever visited because every building is gray because what they use is gray stone that they have and it's now a major tourist mecca because what they did is so beautiful and one of their ugliest buildings that town council proposed to tear it down and everyone rose up and said no because of the art that was on the side they didn't want to glad they liked it so I think this notion that it's economic development it's not just pretty you did some in New York but some of the New York sites relive what New York history is and social justice when I walk the streets of Melbourne we don't often celebrate this but there were women statues of women suffragists fighting for workers rights and Melbourne was built by prisoners but when there was a workers right issue they actually have a statue of the stone mason who put down his sledge saying he wouldn't build anymore until they did such and such they have a statue celebrating a minimum wage strike where people and so tourists go around and get a history of the town that's how I knew these I just called this woman around it was really very exciting so I think we should think of if this is exciting not just a pretty picture so the other thing I wanted to just say is I think Lynn there's a way of moving forward more quickly than just waiting for the 19th although we might have to do it formally but I'd be willing to be if we want to say someone from finance should be on a work group I'd be willing to be on it to do whatever if we need to do fine tuning of the wording so maybe we can get who on CRC and it's just a small group that gathers up the questions and then brings something back so it doesn't have a feeling of just us all thinking about but a little bit more of a feeling of action just want to build on what Kathy and Dorothy said I feel it's a challenge only if we look at the cost side and don't look at the value and revenues that this could drive in particular I found it really interesting to see that in terms of tourism art attracts tourist revenue and I thought it was really interesting that American cultural travelers spend on average 60% more than other types of travelers and they take more trips and so if we can integrate this together with our eco tourist educational make it more comprehensive and I'm sure that's what I'm hearing is how to make it a comprehensive strategy that weaves in our values our culture our history and tie it into all of that and then it's really providing benefit at so many different levels and I just want to say the other part of financial aspect is I read it art enhances property values so that's another angle to look at it attracts business businesses and it gives jobs to people so again I would be in favor of first supporting the local artists looking around just to see if there's anybody else in the committee any other comments from our two representatives I would just add too what Dorothy said that we also have in addition to the public artworks you mentioned a number of murals scattered around town including that enormous history mural that's now being repainted behind 1 East Pleasant Street so there's there's Marty you're correct that we don't have an enormous amount of public art but what we do have now is an opportunity for some really iconic pieces that we couldn't possibly afford otherwise that we can't because of percent for our program contribute to Amherst's streetscape can you around you tell me and then we really do need to move on a question about costs like in terms of is there a guarantee from the artists of how long these structures are supposed to last and their maintenance costs so that will be part of the project development but certainly we would expect that these would last the lifetime of the building I mean that's the way these projects are designed anything else now okay so I thank you very much and I think that need to ask Sean how your timing do I need I assume we need to get to you now or I don't know if there's anybody with public comment who might want just a couple minutes okay why don't you you need to come up to the microphone you need to introduce yourself and make sure that we need to go later because the difficulty of calling our other meeting yeah thank you Shoshona King 46 Rowling Green Drive in Amherst the experience economy is here how Amherst evolved to meet this arts and culture are catalysts for creative economic development and with the utilization of the percent for art program Amherst may embed opportunities for quality of life and economic development that a robust arts culture and creative sector can bring according to a survey conducted by the Joint Legislative Committee on Cultural Affairs 99 percent of the chief executive officers in industry stated that the availability of a healthy cultural climate in an area is an important consideration in choosing a new location the travel industry association of America's findings in the national travel survey showed that 65 percent of American adult travelers say that in the past year that they had included a cultural arts heritage or historic activity or event while they are on a trip of 50 miles or more this equates to 92.7 million cultural travelers of those 92.7 million travelers 32 percent of those which means 29.6 million travelers added extra time to their trip because of a cultural art heritage or historic event or activity other cultural activities enjoyed our live theater art galleries heritage or ethnic festivities musical performances by engaging in public arts art as a tool for growth and sustainability communities can thrive economically 70 percent of Americans believe that the arts improve the image and identity of their community thank you thank you so can you make sure we get your first and last name just write a piece of paper so I can get it in a minute thanks I heard it but I'll spell it wrong if I don't get it written down submit to you or you can just that's one other comment yeah uh Lynn yeah I not to be labor this but I've actually gone back and checked both our charter and our rules of procedure the council has to establish any ad hoc committee at that point I can appoint people to a committee generally that talks about committees of the council but I also know that we have had committees that include other than that so unfortunately we can't do anything until we meet again on the 19th I would suggest that we try to come up with a charge for that ad hoc committee by that time maybe Kathy and others are willing to work on that and bring it forward okay so Shonda I think you know most of the people here I think hello Sean again I'll director of finance for the schools and helping out town capital the tool I might need Sonya tell me where to put this things have changed up here there used to be a huge TV smonder and now it's gone it went from like really big to really small so it's thank you thank you okay so this is version 1.2 we presented 1.1 to you all and I think the over our chain feedback was make it simpler so as I go through this you'll see that it's much simpler there's a few more pieces of feedback that I recently got from both Sonya and the town manager that I still have to implement and I'll point out what those things are but my hope is to go through this today get your feedback incorporate that feedback and then set it out to you all within a couple of days to play around with it some more just a little historic since there are two people who were on previous finance committees and I know at least one if not both you were sitting in a room when Sandy Polar showed us his first version this is Sandy Polar on steroids just to be clear it's almost the opposite it's almost like I don't know where the opposite steroids are it's all right so that's the version instructions so there's fewer instructions fully read the instructions review the glossary of terms and then go to the simulation tab and then there's as you'll see when we get there there's a number of prompts that you sort of address and then you can look at the charts and see what happens the glossary has changed a little bit some of the terms we pulled out because when we simplify the sheet some of the terms went away we changed net zero premium to net zero cost to try to steer away from the term premium but we can add more to this glossary as you go through it if you see the terms that maybe I missed we can add to this and so this is really most of it so there's a number of questions here or prompts and I'm going to go through each one and just show you the different responses and there's a number of variables we can't go through all the different variables today but that's the point of the tool and then I'll get your feedback and adjust it accordingly so the first one is use the drop down boxes to select the projects you want to model the cost of each project and the start date of construction in addition check the boxes for projects to be funded by existing capital funds uncheck the box for projects funded by debt exclusion override so one piece of feedback already received was these boxes are really little so I'm going to work on fixing that making these checkboxes bigger and maybe doing the opposite checking it if you want it to be debt exclusion versus unchecking it so you've got your different projects over here library, fire station, DPW the new 600 student school Fort River and Wildwood and next to each of those you can put in different amounts another piece of feedback I already have is to put more options for amounts and have zero be an option and just more range of numbers to choose from for right now for the library for example there's 25 million, 30 million and 35.6 but we'll add more options we'll get there when we add more options yeah the grant is already so the grant for both the library and the school is already factored in here it's not an assumption anymore to play around with it's it's factored in based on this is total project cost and the grant funds will be applied automatically you can change the starting construction year again I can add more options but this is between 2023 and 2027 and then this is the little box to check which we need to make bigger but you check it uncheck it and it makes it either debt exclusion or come from existing capital funds available to the town so fire station same thing there's three options right now we'll add more and so on and so on for the schools one of the pieces of the feedback that is a little bit more of a a bigger change I have to work on is trying to make it an either or so instead of you being able to accidentally put in amounts for all three schools and have that projected out which isn't really a realistic option making it an either or so if you did the 600 student school then you wouldn't be able to do the Fort River and Wildwood and vice versa but this again just allows you pick all the amounts that you want right now if you wanted to do this you would just click the NA if you didn't want to do that option but we'll do the 600 student school and we'll do NA for these two so what this is saying right now is these are the amounts we're projecting for these projects these are the fiscal years and again this is just hypothetical right now and that we want to fund all the projects out of existing capital funds so right now there's no debt exclusions factored in then you choose an estimated borrowing rate so between three and five percent I'll keep it at five you can choose an estimated net zero cost so this is added on to whatever the base construction cost would be this goes from zero up to 10 percent I'll leave it at five cost escalation factor so depending on what year you pick for starting year the cost escalation will compound as you go forward so I'll do four percent for that and how much will be allocated towards other capital needs in town so 2.5 million is about half of what's currently allocated towards capital needs in town you could leave it almost closer to what we currently spend on capital needs in town but I'll leave it I'll put it at 3 million for now and so once you answer those prompts you scroll down and you can look at the charts that we've seen before so this chart shows a few different things the first most important thing is this line this is how much is available from our existing funds for capital so this is the 10 percent of the tax levy projected forward so if it's over this line it means it goes beyond our current capacity to pay from existing funds this green bar is our existing debt which is projected to run out over the next few years this yellow bar is the ongoing capital so if I chose 5 million instead of 3 million you'll see that line get that bar get a lot bigger so obviously less available for other capital but I'll put it back for now and then all the other bars are related to the projects so fire is red DPW is gray library is purple and the new 600 student school is orange so those represent the annual premium and interest payments in that year so they stack on top of each other so you can see can we afford all these capital needs or not if I say we're going to do a debt exclusion for the library and the school then you'll see those two come out because those will now come from a different source of funds and it looks much more doable in terms of what can be what we can afford and this little chart down here shows you how much above the 10% levy line these debt payments are so in aggregate for all the years that the debt payments exceed this line it's 16 million over and this chart we modified a little bit just to look at the outstanding debt so this just really totals the outstanding debt from these new projects so at its peak we hit about 115 million somewhere in there and then as we paid off it would go down and then the impact from the debt exclusion so there's sort of two peaks here because we had two projects the library and the school so the first debt exclusion is based on the year that you pick that's would be the average impact on a $322,000 property which is the median we changed this from the last time it was I think the average household last time we changed it to the median household so it went down a little bit in terms of the property value but this would be the average impact from the first project that's debt excluded and then when the second project is debt excluded it would spike up again and then come down over the life of the project if that's how the debt payments are set up for that project and there's a little summary explanation under each of these that sort of gives more information on each of these charts so if just so you can see how it works if I if I recheck these and said we're not going to do a debt exclusion for any of the projects then this goes to zero because there would be no additional taxes but we can't do it because we can't do it but you can't do it because you can't afford it so so again it's there's lots of different variables for you to play around with and see what what is produced I've got a couple like a set of a few more things to fix or update to maybe streamline the options even more and give more choices for for dollar amounts but open to your feedback and if there's other information you think we should have the show or organize it differently whatever you think I'm going to ask one and then I'm going to ask Kathy since she had her hand up and I saw in go around the room the question of the five percent borrowing cap um is that is that a line that did I miss that so I'm sorry say that again the the question of the the borrowing cap we took it out of here because with the school projects before there was a debt ceiling line in here but with the financial advisor telling us that the school projects are outside of that it's sort of made that we weren't as close to that as we were before so we've removed that from here okay so this includes this debt here includes all the debt from all the projects but it's not it's not a debt ceiling sort of comparison it's just looking at the outstanding debt from these projects okay for there are new members if you have a question about that question ask me afterwards Kathy Ken thank you for the extra work you put into this just out of curiosity can you change your five percent interest to three percent and then move down yes this is one of the things he's added since last time you know on whether if we went out to the market now you can be at that rate and to what extent it affects it so we're able to change start dates now and you've limited the extent to which we can try to build a school for a dollar right yeah now you have either range you know so this is more a tool to inform so I guess my my main question on the additional things you want to do with this you're showing the impact on a median household if we do that exclusion I know I'm going to be asked but my home is five hundred thousand dollars or my home is two hundred thousand dollars so if there could be a really simple way of going from one to the other without you giving us a lot more numbers that would just be great yeah no it's actually another piece of feedback the town manager gave was that there's a way maybe down here to put a little field where somebody can type in their property value and then have it calculate their specific so that'll be another piece that will because I don't think you want to you know I like the cleanness of this and my you know I'm you see my I'm craning my head to go around but when I did a district meeting with the earlier version of this which hasn't changed that much I converted a couple of these pictures to PowerPoint and made the font really big because you can't see it you know and so unless you have a huge video screen you know the line made total sense to people they understood being above the line means we can't we don't have the money to spend you know so just trying to think of font size when you come back so even the label on this it's too small you've got plenty of room in that picture to make the font size bigger yeah yeah I can do that you know I used to have a a rule when I did presentation no smaller than x if I want someone three rows back to be able to read it sure yeah I can do that did you know Bob yeah I I'm a little bit new to this but it seems to me that it would be helpful to have a wider range of start dates so we could see what happens if we stretch some of these projects out over time sure yeah I can make it I can make it go whatever you guys think I can go out 10 years starting with 2022 or something like that you didn't limit it last time is it limited now it's limited now yeah it has a limited options for right now I think it's five years because I did exactly that I said suppose I stretch them out over 15 years you know just really stretch them out I mean just to see what the impact is and it may not be realistic but it might give us some better insights as to what options are available yeah that's no problem to do in the start date on years then inflates the construction cost to the assumption that's made I know that Mary Lou Hederer hand up I was just trying to make sure that you had gotten your question answered okay Mary Lou thank you I can't see this as clearly as I would like to but do we have the number of bond years the old one had 20 years 25 and 30 yeah so this assumes 30 we could make that an option make it 20 to 25 or 30 we could have three options if you want to do that well I think at least 25 might be helpful I'm not sure we could do all the projects on a 20 year bond okay yeah I can add that yeah I think that the one of the things we've been thinking about is to what extent do we want to make this available to the public at large so that members of the public can look at it and see for themselves as to how choices affect them and the more choices you put in the more complicated it gets for that purpose and so you sort of get this toss-up between the value to us and the committees and the council and the general public that would not have our level of involvement with it necessarily and that was one of the struggles that we think we've been working with Lynn I'm sorry go ahead let me just go to an example project okay go to the library just where you are right now with the library funding statewide it's about a 32 million dollar project okay and they may know as early as July 1st 2020 that they're going to get their money at which point they have six months to have the town basically decide are we going forward and so the town portion at that point becomes a minimum of 15.9 million plus actually interestingly enough a guarantee on close to another six million and so the 225 would be the construction year right yeah I mean that put that out but I think right now I think plan construction was 2022 or 2023 somewhere in there but yeah that's that would be the construction year okay so that's an example okay how you can go through and refine this and look at it and so forth the other place I know when I played with the model the previous one I played with front loading some of the sidewalk road stuff in other words the other capital needs the vehicle stuff etc and reducing obviously the price of some of these things but then slacking off on a couple of the regular ongoing items which doesn't make you popular but you're not going to be popular either way here so it doesn't matter so it allowed you though to get yourself a little more under the line in the model that we had in the past and I'm not clear that I see the ability to shrink that up above for the gold part yeah I mean the way it's shown here now is just if you're under the line you can assume that there's room to spend more but if you wanted it to be like phase like how much we're going to spend on ongoing capital for the next 10 years have a certain amount and then the next 10 years after that have a different amount we could have a separate field for that but it might make it more complicated but it's the other thing is just to go back to the library because I'm not forecasting where I stand on this but go back to the library and that is they have given us a figure that if they don't tear down and rebuild the addition that renovations would be somewhere around 10 million so I want to make sure that that number is in there as well yeah I think that's the and I seek your guidance on this I mean the hard part with both the school project and the library project is the timing because this is going to let you plug in variables and see the cost but they're not always going to line up with what we actually have to do either the requirements of the grants or the requirements of like you said of the town voting its portion or the library being flexible what's new construction versus what's just you know those renovation needs of the library I don't know if that would be considered new construction or if that would just come out of ongoing capital I think in this case we would probably be saying okay here is a huge package of renovation and that would be about 10 million so we could me I'm going to work on this tonight and tomorrow sort of like the schools where it's an either or yeah with either the 600 student school or the forever wildwood we could have something library which is you know if it says zero for a new library then it prompts a number for renovations and you need to do that because you've got the grant built into 35,000 and otherwise you can't do what Lynn's suggesting say just plug in the number 10 right no yeah you can't do it right now because you only have these options you'd have to like the school gets 50% of a grant thing so he's got that he's not allowed the old one allowed me to choose how to do that but this is not allowing that was to try to limit that sure yeah but you're you're right right now you couldn't do that so I'd have to build that in but that can be done interestingly enough at this point the library we have some of the firmer numbers on so that I mean the grant that they are in queue for and number two on the list is the grant itself would be about 13 million something and the so it we're starting to hone in on that firmness and another piece of this I'd have we'd have to probably talk to the library director about this is you know if you scale down this project from what's sort of the approved budget or the is the grant still available at that point this may be one of the ones where maybe we don't want options maybe it's either the option that's out there or it's the renovation or maybe you do what you did with the schools and you either haven't either either or yeah yeah so yeah I would suggest just adding another row under library of one is library new library renovated yeah yep yeah I can do that this is just a comment or another suggestion I think where there is like the law whether where there is a limit I think there should be a label on graph this is a line we can't cross something to that effect you know something more that grabs your attention again for the public you know for people who aren't versed in this it would just be a you know his very first version but he has the cumulative how much we're too high but he used to have this exploding red star with a big number in it like you just you're 25 million in debt here yeah we can bring that it was like and can you go back to the lowest one where you look at people's the impact on people's tax rate do you want me to have it show something yeah so now we've had a debt exclusion override which means you're paying more taxes than you presently pay can we have like maybe three or four lines if your house was 250 your house was 350 or whatever yeah I mean we could do that that was how it was originally the other thing I could do with this chart I don't know if you like the 322 or not I could just have this chart be a question of above choose the value of your home and then this chart would just be based on that and we could just have a note that says if you want to see the median or the median income it's put in 322 but if you want to see your own home value choose your own and then this chart would just reflect that okay and I'll just yeah fix the titles of it and used to be an amazing piece of work Sean thanks thanks had one other question on what you've built on the design if I do if I don't choose the 600 person school but I choose the two schools do you make me choose construction dates that are farther apart like I can't say I'm going to do them both in one year or you could and have you built in a grant assumption yeah so the grant assumption for this is one of them gets one of them has the MSBA grant the other one does not okay so right now it's one does and one doesn't so you're no longer allowing me to have both with a grant but I'm waiting eight years for grant two yeah it's a good point if you choose a wider span of time so I'm just asking them what I can and can't do with this because we will get some questions it's a good point to clarify whatever however I adjust it to maybe allow you to do the MSBA for both if you span the time enough because you're right if you did 10 years apart then it's possible you could do MSBA for both but if you try doing both near each other then would not okay okay so the solid line that sets the limit is based on 10% and that's not a changeable number currently it's not I thought about it we can because one of the pieces of feedback was can we make it 11% or 10.5% so it could be a changeable number if we want it to be and when we were talking about that is that would we do it just for like for four years we'd go up right knowing that that means on the operating budget side yeah everyone is getting very thin Senya would like to chime in yeah not to put out any doom or gloom or anything out there but there's always the possibility that that 10% we need to go down for future budgets well that actually was why I was putting the 10% asking this for a 10% question because you and I have lived through operating budgets under those scenarios where we had to reduce the number quite a bit and very little us too and I had three as a residents say lines don't always go up yeah that's the other thing yeah yeah sure um because we really don't know the other thing that I thought about is I looked at it and said that question is to the inflexibility of the 10% gets back to a question that we're talking about with a prior presentation on percent for art I don't know if you've done any thinking about that but if we as a community adopt percent for art um as it's been previously proposed at a half percent and don't include it in any way to is an option which we're either doing you're then saying that it has to come out of other things that you're proposing to put into the project that you're going to cut a half a percent of other things out of a project we were already maneuvering to try and as we heard from Guilford be value conscious and decisions and make appropriate decisions so I don't know how if there's any way maybe it doesn't maybe it's just a topic we have to set aside from this process but I thought I'd at least ask yeah at one point I think we had it in here and we took it out because of the uncertainty around it or at least at that time so it's some something we could put back in as an additional cost sort of like the estimated net zero cost it could be a a field for that that's more known I think it's a fixed amount right the the half a percent so yeah the bylaw for net zero allows you to go up to 10 percent right but the it could just be something and a fixed factor but I think seeing it in there would it be useful to have a chart like this that showed the cost of it yeah we can certainly add into the the the cost of the projects would it be helpful to see sort of what the total amount was as depicted in the chart I'm not sure how it works is it a up is it a lump sum up front based on the project cost or would it be based on the annual payments or is that decided yet that's one of the unknowns about the bylaw okay is how is it calculated and are we is it part of the original borrowing with the purpose some people feel that's the only way you can do it some people feel that it's by you know value engineering your project and therefore you can squeeze the money out and some people feel like it should just come from another pot so it's I've heard at least those three options okay well it's definitely something we could add to this when it's more defined but for now I can add that piece up above if you want to add that in so a question I have is whether the benefits of the net zero construction in terms of operational costs aren't built in as well no they're not and we did I mean and I can make this more expansive on the glossary we did try to be clear that this is the additional upfront cost to make the building completely right I understand I don't understand it we're complicated yeah I mean in effect we are going to get a savings presumably by going net zero in in your operational budget and it's an interesting thing I mean at one point I had actually hoped that maybe we could create a fund within the town the town city of Worcester's done this but it's a fund within the town that you borrow against to do the net zero pieces and then the savings if you will it's like an accounting issue but the savings basically go back to fund the fund but we have not done that thus far yeah I might come back to net zero in a minute but Sharon you had something I just wanted to throw out like I feel like the more this committee talks about fine-tuning this the less understandable and the and the less useful it's going to be for the average citizen I think basically someone wants to be able to go on here understand how to put in the price of their home and figure out how much it's going to affect their taxes I mean that's the bottom line I think there's going to be also a subset of people that really want to get into the minutia of maneuvering the different fields around and and this committee certainly wants to be able to do that so I don't know whether it makes sense to have like a very useful tool for us and then you know something that's that's more what you were trying to do by simplifying it it's those yeah and I think that's I think you're right there's there's this and then there's like the version before this that is just more staff working with the council to actually project out the costs yeah but I even think some of the suggestions that we've thrown out here are going to make it less right obvious for people yeah just really just get in there really quick and do it okay whether that's a good thing or a bad thing we can debate along those lines do you think this chart is informative to people I mean this again this is more I don't know if the average citizen would care about this chart it takes up space if you think it's useful we can leave it in there I'm not sure anymore exactly what the value is of it anymore but if you think there's a purpose for it we can leave it in or if there's a maybe a slightly different purpose we can tweak it but I was thinking this might be one we might want to pull out and just focus on the the tax rate impact and then also can we afford it with our existing capital funds if we're talking about people in the public I think it's nice for them to see that the debt goes down so it's not like the U.S. debt right yeah that's true I guess my suggestion would be if you're going to keep it in to have that be the bottom like have the be the last one yeah you know be the the input section and then the very next you know slide perhaps is can we afford it and then the next tax rate one hey what does it mean for me okay that's a good idea give me a clue and I just I'm I I'm Mayor Lewis I had would it it would it be possible to have a simple chart for the public that they can understand and it's more complicated as it were chart for people like the finance committee the counselors and so for it I think something really streamlined for the public but they could also then it could be online if they want to do more but I think something very basic would be the best thing for them sure I'd like to build on that I think that ultimately especially at the point at which we go out for a debt exclusion override the question and everybody's going to mine is what does it mean for me and by that point we'll know what the costs are so there's a point at which we freeze the picture and then it's a matter of playing with what does it mean for me as a taxpayer in terms of my property tax yeah I mean as a planning tool we will consider in the council level with the assistance of the committee the decisions about how much to build and when to build but so the interactive some of the interactive pieces are very important for those decisions when it gets around to the question of public support it does narrow down my one comment about net zero by the way just is that it's actually a fairly complicated question because if you read the bylaw there's a piece that has to do with building buildings that are net zero already which means that they have all of the insulation and structural pieces in place that will allow for net zero to be effectively added to the building and then the additional pieces that cost of the solar panels and they're actually two different parts in the bylaw not one not one single part and I don't think that we can deal with that today and nor is part of this process but I think it's a committee we just have to keep remembering that it isn't quite that simple yeah the cost of solar panels if I am inversely some can be a huge range yeah in the question of the effect on operating costs is out there too the other thing that I keep trying to figure out how to get people to understand is that the more of debt that you charge against existing 10% limit the chart that you're currently looking at in order to make it work then you have to shrink down the part that's the ongoing capital which is where they get their road repairs done and we're that in reality is a variable factor for community to consider but I think we're freezing it in as I understand what you're doing you're yeah I mean it's building in a fixed amount so the road repairs would come out of this and this grows a little bit there's some growth attached to the 2.5% it grows with the levy just like the the 10% line but the other roads would have to come out of that chunk that's what I'm just going to add when I unfortunately cut someone off when I did some a presentation with this month or so ago I froze a few scenarios and just talked to people including the think-out 20 or 15 years what happens but I included a slide that states what Andy is saying this is how much money we have each year and this is what we've been spending to anchor it in a million for roads you know something that people would understand so that are we choosing two and a half million or three and a half million for your green your yellow bar any time we go anywhere near two and a half million we're spending less than we're spending now considerably less for the repair of building because it it was it was very useful to have done that on on what is that imaginary number everything else is still ongoing it's not you know so I I think we can we can have a tool but we can have a couple introductory definitive things that says this is the reality of Amherst and then this is showing you what we had if we try to build all these buildings yeah and I can try to add some sort of notation here or maybe on the gloss sorry that gives a context of what we currently spend so people know when they're choosing three million what the impact of that is that it's not just choosing a smaller amount and I'm just thinking when you very first came on with this you actually did something very clever because you are very clever but you had a couple stylized PowerPoint charts and then you suddenly were in the model you know so there was something outside of that which just gave you some facts and then you were flipping through the scenarios yeah so if there's just some way that we can think of not having this do everything but but we can next yeah yeah okay and then I wonder I I hate to even bring this up but I'm off I do wonder if there's any way to take the roads and sidewalks issue which presently is estimated at about 16 million and put that in not as a one-time borrow project but as a project that over time we get a better grip on so almost as like almost like a separate yes option here not saying we're borrowing for it but saying we're allocating next number of dollars per year to that so it stands out separately yeah only because there are people who would choose roads and sidewalks over any other project right in roads and sidewalks who's complicated about the fact that we live in New England and as you repair roads they deteriorate at the same time and so it's it's never quite that 16 million dollars is somewhat of an elastic number I found from having looked at that number over quite a number of years you don't reduce it by the amount you put in any given year because it's really a backlog and the backlog is something that builds by the erosion of roads but such as the complexity of our lives where we need to go is Councilman's Finance Committee is we need to be thinking about developing a capital plan for major building projects and that's what this is really all about and Sean and I have had this discussion both in this committee and with JCPC and so I just want to touch base we've recognized in this discussion that there's these questions what can we build what are the complexities and then the costs of the building so we're going to build of the ones we choose to build and what's the timing and sequence and those are variable decisions and they have to be answered and ultimately the Council needs as the elected body to make that decision but we need to get the wisdom of this committee to help that process along we need to make sure that the public is involved and then the question of JCPC is important too because that is the body that includes representatives of the two other elected bodies the school committee and the library trustees who are very much our partners in this and our school committee cares very much about that project and I can say the same for the library trustees about their project and JCPC has been is the forum which was really created originally to bring those the bodies together including at that point the select board and finance committee as it was previously structured to try and make decisions about major buildings that kind of evolved into ongoing capital projects but it started as a major building enterprise so we need to be thinking about this question of how we are going to make those decisions what are going to be the roles for the various bodies that I've mentioned including the public at large and how to get them involved and then what the process is that we want to propose for the council consideration and through JCPC to the other elected bodies so we've got a complex piece of work ahead of us and I you know we're obviously not going to do that today today was really to make sure that we had within this group a real grounding of understanding about what this whole thing is about and what the complexity of our problem is but the next stages of it is both procedural and substantive and I think that we probably is a practical matter may need to just have it be what is our next meeting date question so that we can pick up on the discussion that I just described to you and figure out how to go forward but I wanted to sort of get us there at the end of this meeting because I think we need to know what it is and these three guys need to know what they just signed on to and so I don't know if there are any thoughts or comments about what I just summarized in the broad disagreement like I'm crazy or anything like that yeah let me add to this that for a while at least the vision is that by some time this fall that we would be utilizing our district meeting structures to go out and have some conversations with those people that want to show up and I think for something like this we'll find a good showing and again that issue of how do you simplify the conversation yet allow all of the very very bright people in Amherst who would love playing with this model also have that opportunity so but the concept would be that for instance in the space of say two weeks we might have a district meeting in each of the five districts and structure additional ways that the community can get back to us again at that point we're not going to have a lot more firmer information than what we have now it's going to be a matter of coming to reality about what we can do and what we can't do and hearing people's priorities but understanding that the people who show up at meetings are not the only voice out there that there is a there are other people who do not don't come to the meeting so if I were to put any condition on this I would hope that by no later than the end of October we were kind of out there talking about this even earlier I'm just wondering the three new members if you have any thoughts crazier otherwise about better ways of involving the public I mean we had a forum required forum I don't remember which one it was in which we had very few people come even though it was a topic of great interest but you know how do we get out and find out what the public thinks and wants so that they get behind our projects maybe district five is unusual but we have our two counselors and they have district meetings which we know when they are they are the last Thursday of the month except in the summer but people show up 30 35 people plus they have a breakfast 8 to 10 on is it the second Thursday of every month and they're scheduled and people show up but that's always seven and eight precincts which is what five is now have always been pretty active but I think if you have an agenda and in the breakfast are kind of they are somewhat structured but you can come with your ideas and the bigger meetings there is a program and that's worked but we're not you're never going to get all the people out that's for sure and of course the district meetings is what Linda's referring to all districts have meetings I think that some have been more successful but they've all been successful to some extent and I've attended district meeting Dorothy's district head at the Jones Library you know I have a question of Lynn or the group of us if and it's around the library if our schedule isn't completely under our control because there's a grant decision that's been made and then we have six months to decide it interacts very differently than all the other projects where we can make decisions so we are going to have to figure out timelines where with that being it's just it is different you know this the school we don't even know whether we'll be in the budget piece but we have one that will spark and that was a question I got you know there's some things that are not in our control of when we want to make the decision we'll have a six month limit on take the money or not so just thinking in terms of when those district meetings happen what people understand what we're we're faced with in terms of decisions out of this committee as well as out of the full council I think we have to go in with and be honest about the assumptions we've made there is also the possibilities that the library could be put off for another year to July 1st 2021 because the amount of the number one and number two is more than what the library people do they could even ask to be put off another year but we can't we could sit here forever and keep guessing and wait for everybody else to make the decisions versus us being in charge of the bus and I think it's time that we move we take the leadership there is a whole other piece here and Sean may not be prepared to talk much about it today but once MSBA invites a community into the process it sets a whole process going and you know that we don't know we in you know we asked to get in this year and we'd be delighted if we got in this year because we're going to have tremendous maintenance costs on the current buildings that are going to build if we don't but it does get to be a process I think that I sent out to some people from meeting of the Association of Town Finance Committees which was an organization that we used to belong to which is for town finance committees that MSBA did a presentation for them that is a series of slides and it was actually very informative about laying out what the whole building process is about I think at some point we really need to understand that certainly if we got into the process we'd need to understand it for sure but it's not like we can control the process controls it John yeah I don't have any specific information but you're right there's a the feasibility phase would start procuring out all the designers and the OPM everything like that and then you'll be on that timeline that you work out with the MSBA so you'll have to make decisions you know along that timeline so you're right it starts us down a path that we don't have complete control over at that point so it seems that the one thing that we may have control over is the DPW well but that has to come after you have to knock down the you have to you have to put the file okay you have to knock down the DPW put the file then which do which do you do next actually there is more than one answer there are ways to temporarily house DPW so you could be engaged in both projects and it's not necessarily the most desirable but yeah there's one might say yes you've got to knock you've got to build a new DPW before you can build a new fire station because you need the property where DPW is that's the very logical way to think about it so there are but I think what we're recognizing is that there are pieces that are beyond our control at this point because we're waiting for grant decisions from two state agencies library and schools so but I think we're still with the question of how to involve JCPC the council the public are all sort of the next steps I guess my suggestion I'm going to throw out there just so we can move this along and get in is that two of us Lynn and I Lynn is president of the council in her role as president and as chair of the finance committee and Sean meet Sean and I did do and with Sean really doing all the work I have to give him the credit a description of a month by month process and kind of put it off because and we want to do this meeting first but we want to get wanted to get back to it after this meeting and to see if we can take that and refine it and then bring it back to this committee to look at is the next step and then go from this committee probably to JCPC so it gets out to the others and to the council and start getting feedback on it so that would be my recommendation and if it's agreeable and I think we need to schedule a date for a committee meeting do you want that committee meeting to be just the finance committee or a joint with JCPC it's either as possible we could invite the JCPC members who are not members of this committee into the discussion would make for a larger discussion but it would enrich the discussion but I think that we would it might be that what we need to do is just get people to kind of give us by email vacation schedules so that we know when you're not available and we'll try and do our best and I will ask we can enlarge the circle on that and ask JCPC members also the same question and see if we can come up with the best possible date based on that then we'll know when the three of us need to come up with a model and I'll share that with the slide can I also make sure people do understand that remote participation is allowed it means that you're dealing with definitely audio and sometimes visual yeah actually that's a good point and one that we hadn't really thought about and I should mention that for three of you we're not involved with it that we do have remote participation rule now in place and with the technology that we now have in this room remote participation is easier than it used to be what becomes complicated is when you get two people who are asking to remotely participate at the same meeting such as in especially if they're in wildly different time zones like some of my friends have been done to do but what time was it in India when you were participating yes yeah okay this was a few conversations back about community involvement one thing we've tried and was helpful is doing alternative district meetings in different locations like senior center and then we did another one in apartments and we got a very different turnout and viewpoints so that's something to really keep in mind shall we do a doodle poll to people what about a doodle poll for okay we can do that to find out availability and is it agreed that we should include jcpc members are we allowed to vote on that okay then then we will do that so we'll get the doodle poll together soon and it'll look for broad ranges because this is vacation season and we're mainly talking about trying to set a time to meet in august correct are we doing august in september that's what we're looking at I suppose okay and then three of us will find the time separately to kind of take it from there so I think that that were there any budget updates Sonia I know that the cherry sheets are not out until friday so I guess if the cherry sheets are wildly different from what we expect which I don't think they will be let us know and otherwise I mean because we have adopted the budget for this fiscal year that started on july 1st and we're just on course with that and we're far away from thinking about next year so I have nothing else to put forward as far as topics not anticipated 48 hours before the meeting is there anything else that anybody else would like to I just so you have minutes here I think we're up to date except for anthony took minutes yes and I have them to send to you but they came while you were gone okay so you could just let me know Sonia the only other gap is when it was joint with council it's the same set of minutes but I'm supposed to redo something to send them to you to make them finance minutes you know so I'll just do it so you can post them so I think we're actually up to date of minutes yes I'll send you Anthony's minutes separately okay so as that if that's agreeable I appreciate everybody's sticking with it as long as they have thank you all very much and is there a motion to adjourn second all in favor okay so we are adjourned 445 and thank you and I again thank you for your volunteering to be a part of this committee and I hope it was understandable and not too scary